Distributed component support for integrating large-scale parallel HPC applications

Abstract

Component-based software engineering (CBSE) is now a widely accepted paradigm for developing large-scale commercial software. The Common Component Architecture (CCA) and its associated Babel toolsuite is designed to enable CBSE for High Performance Computing (HPC) scientific applications. Many scientific applications have adopted the CBSE paradigm and demonstrated its effectiveness using CCA.Properly designed, integrating multiple distributed HPC applications into a large-scale system allows the overall system to take advantage of scattered resources and to provide alternative strategies in enhancing system's overall parallelism and performance. There exists several ongoing projects to add support for connecting multiple parallel applications using various distributed technologies, including the Babel Remote Method Invocation.In this paper, we review two different approaches to enable interconnection between conventional CCA HPC applications. Specifically, we extend our previous work on distributed proxy components and develop a new Babel RMI library that supports Common Object Request Broker Architecture's (CORBA) Internet Inter-ORB Protocol (IIOP) transport mechanism. Finally, we provide both qualitative and quantitative comparisons among various approaches and transport mechanisms.